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What couples living in different time zones should do
On the night of October 25, clocks in Germany go back an hour. Clocks in Turkey don't, because Turkey dropped daylight saving time in 2016 and stays on the same time all year. From that Sunday morning, a partner in Berlin is two hours behind Istanbul instead of one. When Europe moves its clocks forward again at the end of March, the gap shrinks back to an hour.
One hour or two looks like nothing on paper. You find out otherwise when you live it. You've finished dinner and they haven't left work yet; you're getting ready for bed and their evening is just starting. That's the tiring part, two rhythms that never quite line up.
When the gap is small
With an hour or two between you, you're living the same evening, just not at the same level of tired. Call at eleven at night and one of you has finished the day while the other is still halfway through it.
Ege, one of the people who started Tomurcuk, spent last year in Leuven while his partner was in Ankara, an hour apart in summer and two in winter. Here is how he describes it on our site:
Around this time last year, at eleven at night, I would press the phone to my ear and count the sentences that started with "so, what else".
The time difference plays a small part in that scene. Two tired people are trying to tell each other about their day and can't find anything fresh to say. With small gaps, the best thing you can do is stop leaving the call for the very end of the night. A fifteen-minute call earlier on usually goes better than an hour on the phone near midnight.
When the gap is big
New York is seven hours behind Istanbul in summer and eight in winter (the US turns its clocks back on November 1). Your eight in the evening is their lunch break. When you go to bed, they're in the middle of their workday.
Looking for a shared evening is pointless here. Find the window when you're both awake and more or less free. Usually that's their morning and your afternoon, or your late night and their late afternoon. If the window is an hour, it's an hour. A short window you can count on wears you out far less than trying to catch each other whenever it happens to work.
Pick a shared moment
A small thing done at the same moment shrinks the distance in a strange way. Making tea at the same time, starting the same episode together, writing an answer to the same question.
On Tomurcuk, the daily question lands for both of you at once, and you choose the time together. When you pick it, the app shows your clock and your partner's side by side, and settings will remind you if the time you chose falls at different hours for each of you. You don't have to answer in the same minute, either: once the question lands, you have until midnight in the time zone you chose. With a big gap, one of you writes after dinner and the other on a lunch break, and the seal opens once you've both answered.
It doesn't all have to be live
What helps most across time zones is accepting that not everything has to happen live. That's what voice notes are for. Two minutes of your voice, left for them to hear when they wake up, can carry far more than a half-asleep phone call.
A photo from your day, a picture of a truly terrible lunch, a ridiculous sentence you overheard on the bus... These say more than "how are you". They look at it on their own time and answer on their own time, and nobody has to wait up for anybody.
Settle this early, too: in a relationship with a time difference, a reply that doesn't come right away usually just means they're asleep. If you both know that from the start, half of the pointless hurt feelings never happen.
Put their city on your phone
One small suggestion to end with. Add their city to the clock app on your phone. Every time you check it, you'll see what time it is there and wonder what they're up to. It's a two-second habit, but it sends your mind their way a few times a day.